Does anyone know if anyone has stared the infrastructure to produce these things en masse in the US? If so, how can someone with heavy construction experience, CAD skills, and embedded experience become a part of that?
I'm guessing the system is named after an old Chinese siege weapon system to give China a message.
https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-t...
US fighting standoff war also throws allies / partners in region with security guarantee to the dogs. PRC going to start hitting US military infra in JP/SKR/PH to drag US into fighting in 1IC.
- LRIP: low-rate of initial production, the early phase of weapons development where kinks are being ironed out before mass-production begins
- C-130, C-17: large, US-made cargo aircraft that we have a lot of
- 1IC: first island chain -- Kuril islands, Japan, Taiwan, Phillippines, and Borneo
- 2IC: second island chain -- Guam, Marianas, Bonin islands. 1IC and 2IC are also references to US defense policy in the pacific, namely to contain the USSR (and later, China) by projecting force westward in the pacific, using islands as stopovers for logistics, etc.
- MIC: military industrial complex
- J-20 fighters: a fighter jet, Chengdu J-20, China's counterpart to the F-22
- PL-17 missiles: China-developed long range air-to-air missiles that are capable of hitting/taking down large cargo aircraft like C-130s
- AWACS: airborne warning and control system, a type of radar system capable of detecting (and defend against) incoming missiles. these systems are large and mounted on purpose built aircraft, so I think the "system" part refers to having enough of such aircraft mixed in with your fleet to reliably detect incoming missiles over a large area
- AGM-158B: US-made, a type of long-range air-launched cruise missile that is being adapted for the rapid dragon
- zerg rush to 100 B21 fleet: refers to the US push to develop a long range strategic bomber, the B-21
https://x.com/eeldenden/status/1610689686271397922
The decision is in Putin's hands and if he plays stupid games, he will win all the stupid prizes.
What are you smoking? Germany is the one that attacked the USSR. I can hardly see how they'll remain anything but allies after that. Actually Germany didn't just attack, they prepared and executed the largest invasion in human history.
> I think China will do a switcheroo on Russia
China is not going to do a switcheroo on Russia. If it wanted to, it'd wait until Russia is exhausted/broken and invade/recover the lands it used to historically belong to them (+resources that come along). Instead, they want Russia to remain as an annoyance to the West.
China is never aligning with the West. They won after WWII and the West tried to break into them in two wars (Korean and Vietnamese) to no avail. They'll fight till the end.
Those Russian lands don't 'belong' to China any more than China 'belongs' to Mongolia or the Jin dynasty 'belonged' to... well itself and just got appropriated as people then like people today and look at borders imagining things were always like that when they werent remotely the same.
The Soviet Union helped Germany evade restrictions imposed on them after WWI. Specifically, they helped Germans develop mechanised forces, air forces, and gas warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_tank_school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipetsk_fighter-pilot_school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomka_gas_test_site
Then they signed this pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... dividing Poland (Soviet forced attacked Poland on 17 Sep 1939).
The Soviets switched sides when Germans attacked them. Then the Germans lost, got divided, then were allowed to re-unite and ... ran straight to Moscow to sign deals that undermined security of Eastern Europe.
Make no mistake, Russia and Germany fight and then can't wait to fall into each other's arms.
> China is not going to do a switcheroo on Russia. If it wanted to, it'd wait until Russia is exhausted/broken and invade/recover the lands it used to historically belong to them (+resources that come along). Instead, they want Russia to remain as an annoyance to the West.
They just told Putin to pound sand when he asked them to finance his Siberian gas pipeline during his recent visit to Bejing. They know Russia is weak.
They were also only 20% as capable as Chinese drones.
Read this and get terrified
https://www.ft.com/content/dd2e936e-5934-49f1-8aa6-29dea9a41...
We also don't know what form drones will take as the technology matures. Quadcopters are common right now because they require exactly zero aerodynamic knowledge to build or fly. Any tween with an AliExpress+YouTube account could design, build, and fly all of the systems we've seen to date. As the systems become more automated in the face of EWAR, lasers, shotguns, whatever, expect a reversion to high speed fixed wing systems that trade a little bit of CDF knowledge for order-of-magnitude performance improvement in basically all realms (payload, range, endurance, speed, survivability etc).
It's a lot like the switch from battleships to aircraft carriers in the early 20th century. When a single squadron of cloth and wooden biplanes became capable of sinking a 50,000 ton armored warship that took 5 years to build, the writing was on the wall, and the countries who didn't adapt lost.
There is a reason we are developing Rapid Dragon (named after a Chinese siege weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) . It quickly converts our 1500+ supply chain heavy aircraft fleet into stand-off attack platforms.
I guarantee the ones fielded in the next ~5 years will start to look like the new high speed bullet quads but with a blended wing between the rotors so they're not wasting energy plowing diagonally through the air. You may see configurations that can tail stand or enter a hover briefly and some that fly entirely conventionally, but the current paradigm of quads hovering near targets is going to be short lived as defenses ratchet up.
As I said, the chips are going to be the issue. If you can deploy a $200 Wish dot com wifi/gps jammer and take down every drone within 500m, again, quantity doesn't do anything. They'll be moving toward relying on spread spectrum and variations of basic image recognition up through spicier algorithms for localization and targeting.
Drop a load over an area with the faces of targets preprogrammed into them and let them flit about looking for cell phone signal sources and if the face that's near the signal is a match explode on their neck.
Imagine releasing that over an airbase. These things can either attack immediately or just fall down to the area around and lie in wait recharging with their panel.
What's the counter to that?
They can. Ukraine and Russia both have started using repeater drones for over-the-horizon capabilities with quadcopters. They can also be mesh linked, and combined with carrier drones to give you arbitrary standoff range for FPV attacks: https://x.com/wilendhornets/status/1772345701772513445
>If you can deploy a $200 Wish dot com wifi/gps jammer and take down every drone within 500m, again, quantity doesn't do anything.
But you can't. If you could, we wouldn't be seeing hundreds of these videos per week. The inverse square law applies no matter how advanced the jamming technology gets. You can protect fixed installations with huge high powered EW arrays, but the individual soldier on the battlefield is completely defenseless. The best they can hope for is a small bubble of protection from whoever in your unit is carrying the 30lbs of jamming gear and batteries, or the limited capabilities of a vehicle mounted system (that can easily be destroyed with artillery or ATGM).
US Military contractors have a very different conception of "cost effectiveness" than most of us.
Anyone outside of Ukraine designing drones right now should simply stop what they are doing and watch and listen and learn from the innovators on the ground there. All of those pie in the sky ideas will probably be completely useless in the face of reality.